I've been stuck with Debian for many years, as Arch and FreeBSD became less practical for my use case. I did enjoy them and it was a learning experience but I need a certain level of out of the box support from the gate. I use the non-free Debian image now to shave an extra step or two downloading wifi firmware etc.

As a whole I feel so much more at home on Linux than Windows, I had to use an X1 carbon with W10 for a short while which was painful (bug free thanks to LTSB version) to use after using gnome for so long. I'm also on a dial up connection and Windows needs extra configuration to make sure it doesn't download anything, out of the box I believe updates are automatic which is annoying.

Do I care if the software I'm using is truly open source? No. I use Debian host OS and a W10 LTSB VM for university applications that aren't cross platform on a T430 that's been with me for a very long time. I see you're rocking a T420, a fellow thinkpad fan I see. I'm glad that Linux is seeing more attention by the masses but to me it's simply a system that just works. I don't find myself installing many new applications often or switching distributions which many people are fond of doing. I prefer stability and scalability.